Background information
When did you first decide to study economics?
Well, there is a story to that. I came to Harvard College in 1940 as a 16-yearold
freshman with no intention of studying economics; I did not even know
what economics was. At that point I thought I might be a biologist but I
proved to be no good at that so I started off as a major in general social
science. I studied subjects like elementary economics, psychology, sociology
and anthropology. The reason I was interested in social science was just the
circumstances of the time. Remember it was 1940, the Depression was just
over, and the war had just begun. In 1942, after two years, I quit Harvard
College and joined the army, which seemed more important to me then. In
1945 I returned to education and I said to the girl I left behind and who has
been my wife ever since, ‘You majored in economics; was it interesting?’
When she said yes I decided to give it a try. At the time I was under pressure
to choose something to study because I was discharged in August and the
school term was due to start in September. I was still an undergraduate.
Anyway, it turned out all right. So the reason I studied economics was related
both to my general interest in what was happening – why society was not
working so well in the 1930s and 1940s – and to sheer desperation because I
had to do something in a hurry.
As a student, which of your teachers inspired your interest in economics?
Mainly Wassily Leontief, who taught me for one course, even before I
joined the army. In those days Harvard College had a tutorial system and
every student majoring in economics had a member of the faculty assigned
to him as a tutor. We met once a week and it was obviously an imitation of
the Oxford and Cambridge system. Wassily was my tutor and I really learnt
my economics from him; he was undoubtedly the main person who inspired
my interest in economics. The only other teacher in those days who really
caught my imagination was Dick Goodwin, who had been my teacher in the
elementary economics course that I had taken in 1940–41. I hit it off with
him very well. After the war when I came back I studied more economics
with him.
Which economists have had the greatest influence on the direction that your
own work has taken?
Since I completed my PhD degree, Paul Samuelson and Jim Tobin – both
very good friends – are the people whose way of doing economics I admired
and still admire. They were representatives of what I now (I did not see it
then) think of as the new style of doing economics after the war. Economics
went from being a sort of cultural subject to a model-building subject, and I
liked that. Paul Samuelson and Jim Tobin were the people who for me
exemplified that new approach. The other name I would mention, but not
from a personal contact point of view, only from his work, was Lloyd Metzler.
I read Metzler’s work after I had read Samuelson’s [1939] multiplier–accelerator
papers. Metzler’s [1941, 1947] papers on inventory cycles and ‘Wealth,
Saving and the Rate of Interest’ [1951] were absolutely splendid. I did not
know Lloyd Metzler very well because he had gone off to Chicago by then
and later he suffered a terrible brain tumour. After that he was no longer the
real Lloyd Metzler.
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